Tag: 2017

This year I’ve decided to experiment with Questing. Psychic Questing was a pretty popular endeavor in the 1980’s and its rebirth can be attributed to Andrew Collins and Graham Phillips. I’ve experimented with this a bit before but this will be a larger endeavor and I even put out the social feelers in order to get others to participate. We’ll see how that goes…

Anyway, in Hedge Druid fashion I’ve done a reading to give me some helpful signposts along the way. I used Tarot as my waymarker and chose eight cards (coinciding with the Pagan wheel of the Year)in order to better understand the lessons I’ll be touching upon throughout the year. The Tarot is merely used to allow the landscape to better mingle with my conscious mind and to understand associations that I may miss along the way. I chose to use the Sacred Sites deck and my first card drawn for the Imbolc season was The High Priestess.

First Steps

I selected a local hike for my first step into the questing world. The area is used quite regularly by local hikers, it’s a series of trails nestled in a dry rocky valley. I felt drawn to this place, and being that questing is all about going with the flow and not ignoring intuition I decided I’d give these trails a try. I prepared a few of the normal hiking accouterments, and my dowsing rod in case I felt like pulling out the geomancy feelers.

When I arrived there were several cars parked at the foot of the entrance of the trails. I decided to leave my rod in the car and play it by ear. I opened myself up to the day and the morning air and began my walk on the trail, despite the number of cars, I saw no one on the trail. I didn’t really get any strong push to go in a certain direction or another so I merely followed the trail. I meandered off here and there, but mostly followed where the trail was marked.

I got to a fork and veered up onto a steeper section. At the fork I paused first, however, to look around at two or three cave entrances, some below me some well above, the route I took didn’t seem to have any. I climbed up for a few minutes, and against a steep cliff face, hidden in a tangle of trees I saw a small cave inlet. An overhang of massive rock sheltered a dugout, a flat stone had been placed for sitting and a few graffiti scrawls marked it’s recess. Some of these marks were the usual names but there were two very large directional crosses composed of wavy lines that intrigued me…something to note down I thought, and look up later.

I didn’t go into the shelter of rock, but continued up toward the peak. At the peak I sat down and noticed that the massive rock face at the foundation of which sat the cave inlet was splotched with green moss. This was an odd site and stood out to me, as I live in a desert region with very little moisture. As I scanned the entire area from my perch I could see that the green dotted here and there on other outcroppings. I immediately thought of something that I had read pertaining to the High Priestess/Sybil card the morning of the hike. The sybil would write her prophecies on oak leaves and leave them outside the cave…not caring if anyone was there to gather them. The large green mossy splotches reminded me of this, and I knew that my quest was beginning, and I was on the right trail. On the way home I thought about how I was there to appreciate the site of the moss, and perhaps in another week the weather would heat up and remove them…just in the way that the prophecies would shrivel and disappear on oak leaves not gathered.

Prior to leaving though I did spend a bit of time looking around in the small cave. It would be a good place to sit, however as I was investigating further a family arrived with a dog and noisily made sure the peace of the place was destroyed. I’ll certainly return another day…